Promo pandemonium: Prehistoric Times, Mark Hallett calendar, public talks, and Norwescon 41

November 28, 2017

Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that is either available now or happening soon:

Sauropod Dinosaurs book excerpt in Prehistoric Times

Been on the fence about the sauropod book Mark Hallett and I wrote? Now you can try before you buy – our chapter on titanosaurs is reprinted in the new issue of Prehistoric Times magazine. I know it’s on newsstands because I picked it up at the local Barnes & Noble yesterday. You can also buy the issue from the PT website, physically or in digital form, solo or as part of a subscription. Many thanks to PT editor and publisher Mike Fredericks for the visibility, the staff at Johns Hopkins University Press for permission, and most of all to Mark Hallett for making it happen. We hope you enjoy it.

Get more sauropods in Mark Hallett’s 2018 dinosaur calendar

Mark has a dinosaur calendar out from Pomegranate, and I’m happy to say that sauropods are featured 5 out of 12 months. The calendar has a nice mix of Hallett classics and some newer works, including the cover art from our book, as shown above. Get it direct from Pomegranate or from Amazon.

Vicki’s public talk on forensic anthropology in December

My better half, anthropologist and author Vicki Wedel, is giving a public talk about her work on the evening of Thursday, December 14, at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. Her title will be, “Bones, ballistics, and blunt force trauma.” I assume the talk will start at 6:00, but check the WSC website for details. The painted skull above is from the natural history museum in Vienna, and it doesn’t have any connection to the talk other than Vicki thought it was rad and I needed a skull to illustrate the post. For more on Vicki and her work, see these posts: cold case, book.

2017VWedelLecture

UPDATE: Final details on Vicki’s talk are out. It will start at 6:00, she’ll be signing copies of her book, Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma, and admission is $5.

My public talk on sauropods and whales in January

In January it will be my turn to give a talk at the Western Science Center. I’m on for the evening of Thursday, January 18. Title is not quite finalized but it will probably something along the lines of, “Dinosaurs versus whales: what is the largest animal of all time, and how do we know?” That’s me with the gray whale skeleton at Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz, back in 2006. I was helping Nick Pyenson measure whales, back when we were both grad students. Ancient blog posts about that here: gray, blue.

See me in Seattle at Norwescon over Easter weekend

If you want to see me star-struck, come to Norwescon, home of the Philip K. Dick Award, next spring, where I’ll be rubbing shoulders with some vastly more famous people. Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award winner Ken Liu will be the Writer Guest of Honor, legendary SF&F visionary Wayne Douglas Barlowe Hugo- and World Fantasy Award-winning artist Galen Dara will be the Artist Guest of Honor, Green Ronin is the Spotlight Publisher, and, er, I will be the Science Guest of Honor. Yes, I’m alert to both the honor and the incongruity of the thing. When I’m not Freaking. Out. about hanging with two of my favorite creators, I’ll probably be giving talks on dinosaurs and astronomy (my other thing) and participating on some panels and signing books. I’ll try not to disappoint.

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in Art, camarasaurs, Hallett and Wedel sauropod book, Mark Hallett, People we like, Rapetosaurus, stinkin' heads, stinkin' mammals, timely
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Photogrammetry: index to Heinrich Mallison’s tutorials

November 25, 2017

Having benefitted so hugely from 3D models that Heinrich Mallison made for me — most notably, the Xenoposeidon model that is the supplementary data file for the recent preprint — I realised the time has come for me to learn to do this for myself. To that end, I am going to read all the tutorials he’s written on the subject. This page is a link-farm to those tutorials, which I made for my own benefit, but which I hope others will also benefit from.

There is also Heinrich’s paper, with Oliver Wings, Photogrammetry in paleontology – a practical guide (Mallison and Wings 2014), which he announced in its own blog-post.

Reference

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in photogrammetry, Tutorial
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An online browsable 3D model of the Xenoposeidon vertebra

November 23, 2017

Peter Falkingham and Nick Gardner independently put me onto Sketchfab: a website that provides a way to view and navigate 3D models without needing to download any software beyond the browser that you’re already running.

So get yourself over to the live Xenoposeidon model! Verify for yourself that the laminae are as I described them, that the posterior margin of the neural arch really does grade into the posterior articular surface of the centum, etc. Really, this is worth ten times whatever set of illustrations I might have provided.

Truly, we are living in the future!

UPDATE, 23 November 2017: see also this beautiful 3d model of the skull of Triceratops horridus, photogrammetrised from images taken at the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France, by Benoît Rogez; and the same creator’s Nanotyrannus lancensis model, also from MNHN photos. And, most astonishingly, his model of the whole MNHN palaeontology gallery!

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in 3D models, Xenoposeidon
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Xenoposeidon: the crucial importance of 3D models

November 19, 2017

In writing the recent preprint “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur” (Taylor 2017), it was invaluable to have a 3D model of the Xenoposeidon vertebra available. Here’s a short clip of viewing the model in the free MeshLab program. (It’s well worth full-screening to get the full impact.)

As I pan around, I look first at the upper margin of the posterior articular facet of the centrum, showing how the posterior margin of the neural arch shades into it — something that is not really apparent from photos, but needs the shifting perspectives that 3D offers to eliminate the interpretation that this contiguous border is due to damage.

Then I zoom in on the complex of laminae at the top of the left side of the neural arch, and explore the shapes of the intersections (ACPL with lateral CPRL, and PCDL with CPOL).

Finally I look at the distinctive sets of laminae on the anterior face of the vertebra which enclose the big, teardrop shaped centroparapophyseal fossa: lateral CPOL coming in from the lateral face of the arch, medial CPOL emerging from the pedicels, and the additional arched laminae that bound the space.

It’s just great to be able to do this. Time and again as I was preparing that manuscript, I went back to the model to check some detail — much as, twenty years earlier, Matt kept driving into the OMNH late at night to look at the Sauroposeidon holotype, to check out some idea he’d had as he worked on the description. The difference is, I didn’t need to drive into Norman, Oklahoma — or even London, England. The idea now of going back to trying to understand fossils from photos seems ridiculous.

A few years back, Matt wrote:

The idea of superseding photographs with 3D photogrammetric models is not original. I got religion last week while I was having beers with Martin Sander and he was showing me some of the models he’s made. He said that going forward, he was going to forbid his students to illustrate their specimens only with photographs; as far as he was concerned, now that 3D models could be cheaply and easily produced by just about everyone, they should be the new standard.

I’m totally on board with that, and said as much in the concluding paragraph of the new preprint.

The last thing I want to say here is to acknowledge the enormous amount of help I’ve had from Heinrich Mallison, digitizer extraordinaire at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. He’s invested many, many hours building models for me from my photos, pointing me to programs that I can use to view them, and helping me get started on making my own models. The greatest regret of my palaeontological life is that, when I happened to be in Berlin on 19th November 2008 and Heinrich invited me to come and watch the Germany-England friendly at his place, I couldn’t do it, and missed out on a pretty unique chance to see England beat Germany, in Germany, with a German. I doubt that chance will come up again any time soon.

I leave you with EmperorDinobot‘s life restoration of Xenoposeidon, which I stumbled across a few days ago. Obviously it’s wildly speculative, but I’m cool with that.

References

  • Taylor, Michael P. 2017. Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur. PeerJ PrePrints 5:e3415. doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3415 [PDF] [PeerJ page]

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in 3D models, Art, life restorations, Xenoposeidon
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Xenoposeidon is ten years old today! And it’s the oldest rebbachisaur!

November 15, 2017

There’s just time before midnight strikes to wish Xenoposeidon a very happy tenth birthday. It came along just a month and a half after SV-POW! itself — in fact, I can’t even remember now, a decade on, whether part of the reason we started SV-POW! in the first place was so we’d have somewhere to talk about it when the paper (Taylor and Naish 2007) came out.

Taylor 2017: Figure 4. NHMUK R2095, the holotype and only vertebra of Xenoposeidon proneneukos, in left lateral view, interpreted as a rebbachisaurid. This interpretation is modelled primarily on MNHN MRS 1958, a posterior dorsal vertebra from the holotype specimen of Rebbachisaurus garasbae. The CPOL passes through a sheetlike PCDL, as in Rebbachisaurus; but the lateral CPRL forms a cross-shaped junction with the ACPL, each of these laminae equally interrupting the trajectory of the other. Abbreviations as used in the text. Scale bar = 200 mm.

For the last few days, I have been working away like a trojan, trying to ready a new manuscript for launching on this day. I’ve taken two days off from my day-job to get it done before this arbitrary deadline, and here I am writing about it with just 15 minutes to go!

The title of this new manuscript (Taylor 2017) is “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur”, and it explains in detail the argument that I made informally sixteen months ago when I first saw the rotating video of the Rebbachisaurus garasbae that Jeff Wilson and co put out with their then-new redescription of that species. I got it submitted (to PeerJ, natch) a bit more than an hour ago, and at the same time I clicked the “Make this available as a preprint” button. So as I write this, I am periodically checking back in the other window to see whether it’s made it through the basic editorial checks yet.

The thing is, I really love Xenoposeidon. I admit that a surprising number of people (my wife, Matt, his wife, Heinrich Mallison, his wife) seem to think it looks like a turd. But I honestly think it’s the most beautiful single bone I’ve ever seen. It’s a privilege to work on it.

Taylor 2017: Figure 5. NHMUK R2095, the holotype and only vertebra of Xenoposeidon proneneukos, in left anteroventrolateral view, highlighting the three sets of laminae related to the prezygapophyses. The trajectories of the medial CPRLs (which emerge from the neural arch pedicels) and the lateral CPRLs (which intersect with the APCLs) indicate the approximate position of the prezygapophyses. The additional arched laminae form the margins of the large, teardrop-shaped CPRF, but meet at a position some way below and posterior to the presumed location of the prezygapophyseal facets. Breakage of both medial CPRLs and the left ACPL and PCDL is indicated by cross-hatching. Note that, from this perspective, the lateral CPRL appears to turn a corner where it intersects with the ACPL, such that the posteroventral portion of the lateral CPRL appears contiguous with the dorsal portion of the ACPL. This is an illusion brought about by the eminence at the point of intersection. As always, this is much easier to see in three dimensions. Abbreviations as used in the text.

Anyway, I’ll link to the preprint as soon as it’s up. In the mean time, I’m just going to bask in the beauty that is Xenoposeidon.

Immediate update

Four minutes after posting this, and just three minutes before midnight, I got the notification from PeerJ that the preprint is up! So you are welcome to leave comments about the science on that page if you wish: I will take them into account when I revise the manuscript in light of the formal peer-reviews that will be coming along in due time.

References

 

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in rebbachisaurids, Xenoposeidon
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